updated 09:50 am EST, Thu November 2, 2006

Adobe Acrobat 8 released

Adobe Systems today released Adobe Acrobat 8, the latest revision of its PDF creation utility designed to improve communication and collaboration across multiple operating system environments, applications, and firewalls while running natively on Intel-based Macs as a Universal Binary. The announcement marks the fourth Universal application from Adobe following Flash Player, DWG Converter, and Photoshop Lightroom beta. Adobe today also released its Adobe Acrobat Connect hosted service, the first Web conferencing and collaboration solution to offer 'always-on' personal meeting rooms. Adobe Acrobat 8 Standard is available for $300, or $100 as an upgrade. Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional is available for $450, with upgrades for registered users of qualifying earlier versions available for $160. The Acrobat Connect hosted service is immediately available as a free trial through the end of the year.

Wheres the Demo

Once again, Adobe's stupidity exists. Even though they made Acrobat 8 Universal, there is no trial for Acrobat 8. Just like there is no trial for Photoshop Elements. What is the matter with Adobe....they started on the Macintosh. They are so dumb I can't stand it anymore.

Acrobat 8; Reader 7??

Let me get this straight; you can author PDF documents on Actobat 8; however, you can't view features that 8 provides, that were unavailable in 7. Since there is no Reader 8, one has to use the most recent, which is 7. Therefore, currently, there is no reader for files generated in Acrobat 8 (unless you export for an older version...)???

Wasn't it the case that they would release both at the same time? Does it not only make sense anyway?

Not to mention that 7 is still PPC only; so now, we finally have a perfect excuse to not even bother with Adobe's reader anymore. Mac OSX Preview application does a great job anyway.

OpenOffice.org

This is the first full release of a major product of Adobe to be a universal binary. They sure are taking their time. OpenOffice.org offers most of the features of Micrososft Office + Acrobat Professional that I would use anyway with the advantage of it being more compatible with Open Source PDF viewers and Preview, although Preview can open almost any PDF anyway. I wonder what it offers if not a new version of PDF and there is no new reader and no reader for Intel Macs. I also see about half the features are Windows only.

Pricing

It looks like the price of Acrobat 8 hasn't changed from Acrobat 7. It still seems like a really high price for the typical office worker who only wants to open PDFs, create files and make the odd edit. That's all I need to do, and $300 seems like a lot to pay. I chose to look around for other PDF products. The best buy I found was Nitro PDF Professional for around $90. It pretty much does everything Acrobat can do.